The Triumph of Dystopian Lit

The reign of Edward Cullen may finally be coming to an end. This isn’t some pro-werewolf statement, or an acknowledgment that after next year, Stephenie Meyer’s vampire stories will officially be old news (the last installment of the “Twilight” films is due out during the 2012 holiday season). The dominant genre in the young-adult publishing sphere—vampires and teen-age girls, or more broadly, “paranormal romance”—is in danger of losing its number-one spot on both sides of the Atlantic, the Independent reports. That might seem like great news for parents, surely tired of their daughters falling for the undead, and for daughters themselves, looking for a little variety in the YA world (and for just about everyone; aren’t vampires totally over?). But don’t get too excited, because from now on, it’s all doom and gloom: we seem to be entering the era of the adolescent dystopian novel.

It’s been eight months since the release of Suzanne Collins’s “Mockingjay,” and YA publishers have been steadily signing post-apocalyptic book deals ever since. Last June, Laura Miller reviewed Collins’s “The Hunger Games” trilogy for this magazine, boiling the series down to its allegorical high-school parallels and casting a critical eye on the genre at large. Miller quotes British academic Kay Sambell on the crucial differences between adult and YA dystopias (“For one thing,” Miller says, “the grownup ones are grimmer”—the classic dystopian novel ends with the protagonist’s final, crushing defeat):

Because authors of children’s fiction are “reluctant to depict the extinction of hope within their stories,” Sambell writes, they equivocate when it comes to delivering a moral. Yes, our errors and delusions may lead to catastrophe, but if—as usually happens in dystopian novels for children—a new, better way of life can be assembled from the ruins would the apocalypse really be such a bad thing?

I guess it wouldn’t be so awful? Just like having a vampire boyfriend, eternally youthful and broodingly chaste, might not be the worst thing, either. The metaphors of adolescence are pretty clear in both genres; it’s the overall shifting trend, one that has teen-age readers longing for the end of the world, that’s a little puzzling—to me, anyway (don’t ask me about phases; when I was eleven, I spent several months only reading books about girls hiding from Nazis). Perhaps the dystopia boom is dictated by the publishing industry, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, or perhaps YA readers are responding to an increasingly dire collective worldview. A few months ago, the Timestook a look at the growing trend and offered up a range of opinions; the responses are definitely worth checking out.

There is a silver lining in all of this, breaking the vampire fixation aside: if dystopian novels are meant to be prescriptive, showing just how bad things could get someday, maybe the children growing up now will take their warnings to heart. Perhaps they’ll be kids like Jeannie and her copy of “The Bell Jar,” happy to be reading, no matter how dismal the subject matter.

(Illustration: R. Kikuo Johnson)

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